One of the most enduring gaming franchises of all time, and possibly the single most recognizable video game character to ever exist, Mario is a pop culture phenomenon. From the early days of fighting in two dimensions to traveling across galaxies and being reinvented countless times, Mario has always been relevant to the gaming industry.

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With spin-offs that have become their own franchises and plenty of mainline entries in his own games, Mario has proven to be truly timeless. However, all those years of history do come with their own failed experiments or bizarre entries, and the Mario franchise is no different from any other that has lasted this long.

10 Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle

Crossover Strategy Game

The crossovers that Mario has had are huge in variety, after all as a flagship Nintendo character, he has appeared in a lot of their large-scale projects. However, one of the most completely bizarre crossovers he has had to date was with the Rabbids, an entity not that popular in their own right.

However, simply crossing over with them was one thing, but Kingdom Battle was quite something else. Putting Mario and the Rabbids together in a turn-based strategy game where Mario must move across the land with his allies and eliminate all the enemy Rabbids felt like one of the more baffling options Nintendo could have taken, even if it is a fun entry-level strategy game with a variety of great teams that can be created.

9 Paper Mario

RPG Spin-Off Franchise

Though it has become a huge success of a spin-off franchise, Paper Mario is another truly strange idea that Nintendo had for a spin-off from the main Mario franchise. Instead of his normal adventures, Paper Mario is set in a paper universe and involves Mario, still trying to save Princess Peach as usual, but without many of the gameplay elements that make up Mario games.

Instead, Paper Mario features many role-playing elements, which have barely been seen in the history of Mario games outside this spin-off series. The quirky narrative focus and the turn-based battles that Mario and his party must engage in make Paper Mario one of the best starting points for RPG and JRPG players, with a great variety of games on its own.

8 Mario Tennis

Mario Meets Sports

There has been a huge variety of sporting games that feature Mario and other characters from his franchise, but Mario Tennis was one of the very first spin-off sporting games from the franchise, and at the time it was a truly head-scratching idea.

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More bizarre still is the fact that not only did one of the versions of this game actually feature a narrative story mode, but it also introduced Waluigi to the franchise for the first time. Mario Tennis is now another successful franchise with a number of entries making some of the best tennis games ever, but the concept initially in 2000 was a weird one for sure.

7 Super Mario Sunshine

Beloved Black Sheep 3D Game

Considered by many to be the black sheep of the 3D Mario era, Super Mario Sunshine followed up on the success of Super Mario 64 by designing this game which still feels like a truly original entry in the franchise. Focusing hugely on the FLUDD, a water-spraying backpack that Mario uses throughout the game, Sunshine was criticized at the time for focusing too much on gimmicks, although it still comes with a great narrative.

However, the success of Sunshine was undeniable, and it remains one of the most beloved entries in the franchise for many, due to the beautifully designed color palette and the high level of difficulty, which has been both praised and criticized over the years.

6 Mario Paint

Classic Crossover Software

Mario is such an iconic character that if Nintendo is trying something new, it is a good bet that they’ll use Mario to try and ensure some level of sales on it. Mario Paint was one of these, as Nintendo had decided to develop an artistic system and animation program for the SNES, so they made it Mario-themed.

This title was one of the highest-selling SNES games, but follow-ups were limited in nature. The idea feels outdated modern-day, though Super Mario Maker was initially conceived as a similar idea to Mario Paint for the Wii U.

5 Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story

Into Bowser's Body

The history of Mario handheld games that very much do their own thing is long and fascinating. The Mario & Luigi handheld series created some very fun games, but none was so strange or has been as well-remembered as Bowser’s Inside Story.

Instead of working against Bowser in this entry, Mario & Luigi are shrunken down and fall inside the giant monster, prompting them to work together alongside Bowser to defeat Fawful. Using the two screens of the Nintendo DS, Mario & Luigi would work across levels inside Bowser was on the bottom screen in a side-scrolling world while Bowser was on the top screen in the over-world. This mixture of styles created one of the stranger but more wonderfully unique games in the history of Mario.

4 Mario Strikers Charged

Soccer With A Twist

Another Mario sports game that feels truly weird, Mario Strikers Charged is a classic soccer-themed game in which players create a team of five to take on their opponents in a very stylized version of football. With power-up shots and various skills that can be used, the game feels similar to the style that Mario Kart utilizes as a racing game.

Strikers Charged was also strange as it was the first Nintendo Wii game to feature online multiplayer capabilities outside of Japan. This allowed players to compete in online tournaments against each other, creating a totally different atmosphere to almost any Mario-themed game up to that point.

3 Mario Is Missing

Luigi's First Leading Role

Another educational game that featured Mario and his family of characters, Mario Is Missing was a truly bizarre entry. It took place in the real world, where Bowser had taken over the Antarctic and kidnapped Mario, so he couldn’t prevent Bowser from melting the ice caps. Instead, players took on Luigi, who had never been the main character in a game up to this point.

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Luigi’s first protagonist role, the real-world setting, and the bizarre narrative all helped make Mario Is Missing truly strange. But beyond that, the gameplay itself was a point-and-click adventure, which was totally new and remains very strange for the Mario franchise.

2 Mario Teaches Typing

Educational Basics

The educational games were truly a strange time for the Mario franchise, but at least young players could really gain something from Mario Teaches Typing. Like traditional typing assistance tools, this game allowed players to choose a difficulty and a target for their words per minute. They then had to enter letters, words, or sentences based on the difficulty to help their character jump over obstacles.

While it is a truly bizarre idea for a Mario game, Mario Teaches Typing was a very useful tool for teaching, and it made a lot of sense for Nintendo to use a famous licensed character for such an idea. It even resulted in a sequel which came out two years later.

1 Hotel Mario

Bizarre CD-I Game

Many Legend of Zelda fans are familiar with the CD-I system and the strange games it produced for Nintendo characters. Three of the four were for the Legend of Zelda franchise, but the fourth was Hotel Mario, a nearly forgotten game that involved Mario and Luigi traveling through a variety of hotels and closing all the doors.

That made up a huge portion of the game, as well as fighting the underlings of King Koopa at the end of each stage. Alongside full-motion cut-scenes with voice acting and strange, difficult controls, these aspects made up some bad reviews that retrospectively have named Hotel Mario as one of the weirdest and worst video games in existence.

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